Packet traversal or response time may be a primary indicator of network or application service quality. Further, this metric can represent performance directly relevant to user experience or overall network behavior. Conventionally, many probe and/or network equipment vendors offer solutions to measure response times. Thus, networked devices that may already see every packet in a network can relatively easily calculate the traffic time spent traveling between a client and a server. Typically, this approach notes response times as traffic passes from the client to the server, and from the server to the client.
Such conventional passive type approaches provide measurements based on real traffic, which can accurately describe an end-user experience for some network arrangements. However, these approaches may not provide accurate response time measurements for other network arrangements, such as those including asymmetric routing environments.